Aims
The aims of this podcast are to provide an introduction to all aspects of self-publishing, focussing on the “how to” elements, such as how to publish an eBook and make your own paperback available on Amazon. Obviously as the show has been running for a while I do also sometimes cover some more advanced ground.
State of Self-Publishing
Self-Publishing now provides a whole number of new freedoms for people who want to get their work out there for people to purchase, or even for free. No longer do you need to go through a byzantine process of querying agents to make your book available.
Now anyone with relatively low levels of skills can make their book available as an eBook or even as a paperback. Of course one of the problems with self-publishing is that anyone can do it, so anyone does….
But with a progressively more professional approach there is no reason why anyone with a compelling story or a wealth of knowledge cannot be successful as a self-published author. The days of “get rich on Kindle” are probably gone, but there are still opportunities out there.
Brief tour of this site
Most of the posts on this site are related to podcast episodes. My first episodes deal with the basics, such as How to Self-Publish an eBook (Episode 2) and Creating a Paperback Book via Createspace (Episode 4). This site also contains some tutorials, independent of the podcast episodes, such as How to publish an eBook to Amazon.
On later shows I start to have interview shows where I interview people with a particular knowledge area – for example I talk to Debbie Young about how to get your books into a book store (How to Sell Your Books Through Bookshops with Debbie Young (Episode 21)) and selling books in Spanish-Speaking markets (Selling Books in the Spanish-Speaking World with Cristian Perfumo (Episode 32)).
Still later I switched the shows to be taking people through the self-publishing journey from about Episode 133. The podcast is on hiatus at the moment but this site is kept up to help people.
Listening to the Podcast
Many people use sites like iTunes or Stitcher Radio to listen to the shows. This site has the advantage that it is easier to click to material mentioned in the shows, and in some cases screenshots and examples are more clearly illustrated, for example on Creating a CreateSpace Paperback-Ready Word Document from Scrivener which takes you through how to create a word document from Scrivener that can be sent to Createspace to convert into a paperback book.
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